Elkit in Wonderland

High-Tech Weaponry

Can't we defeat Saddam Hussein with spudguns? That would be the stuff of legends.
[Thanks to my brother Lutz for the link.]

Introducing Liam

Checking some of the links of my blogroll, I wandered over to Bittersweet, and found that Zel has resurrected it as a site with info about autism. Her son Liam is autistic, and I've learned a lot from her blog last year, and from these pages now.

Love, Elke

No, I've never been to Egypt, and it's not my handwriting anyway.

A Call For Prudence

Even retired General Norman Schwarzkopf, who led the US troops in the Iraq war in 1991, doesn't think the current administration has made a convincing case for war.

"The thought of Saddam Hussein with a sophisticated nuclear capability is a frightening thought, okay?" he says. "Now, having said that, I don't know what intelligence the U.S. government has. And before I can just stand up and say, 'Beyond a shadow of a doubt, we need to invade Iraq,' I guess I would like to have better information."

He hasn't seen that yet, and so -- in sharp contrast to the Bush administration -- he supports letting the U.N. weapons inspectors drive the timetable: "I think it is very important for us to wait and see what the inspectors come up with, and hopefully they come up with something conclusive."

Yes. What he said.

Where Tears Roll Down

I am doing a rare thing - listening to KFOG's Ten at Ten again tonight - it was just so good this morning! I turned it waaaaay up for Tears for Fears this morning. (Not now, because Holly has gone to bed already.)
And "Yellow Moon" by the Neville Brothers always brings back that year (1989) to me. It was the first I'd heard of them. My favorite radio DJ, Alan Bangs, a British music journalist working for a German radio and television station, introduced me to them. He had a weekly late-night show (midnight to 2am), and he played a lot of stuff you'd otherwise never hear on the radio. He didn't have a playlist, he just played whatever he felt like. He'd go off on tangents, and he'd usually make connections. I remember that Yellow Moon came up because he played something else that was also produced by Daniel Lanois.
(I still have a drawerful of tapes from his show. And I treasure them. I still love Alan Bangs for all the music he introduced me to.)

Anyway ... I really liked the Neville Brothers, and when they came to Germany for their Yellow Moon tour, I went. To all four gigs. Bonn, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Munich. Drove all over Germany, and loved every minute of it. I think I'll tell you more about that tomorrow.

Well Spoken

Good speech last night, I gotta give him that. Good rhetoric on Saddam Hussein, listing some of his transgressions and repeating "He has not accounted for that material. He has given no evidence of destroying it."
Well done. Good writing.
Great proposals too - an AIDS plan, health care reform, including malpractice law reform, tax cuts, money for mentoring kids, and hey! hydrogen-powered automobiles! We may not need all that oil after all ...

It all sounded good, but I didn't buy it. Where is all the money gonna come from for those fabulous plans? Not from tax revenue. And not from all the savings in military expenses when America goes to war ... and he sounded like he was ready to charge. Now, I realize that Saddam Hussein is not one of the great leaders of the free world, and that it's a good idea for him to disarm, and that Iraq would probably better off with him gone, but I don't buy that he had anything to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and I don't buy that he poses an immediate threat to the US, and I don't buy that he's the only bad guy either.
And did you notice he never once said "Osama bin Laden"? He kept mentioning Al-Qaida, but never bin Laden. ("Well, of course not," said Sean when I pointed this out. "It's a bit embarrassing that a year and half after we've said 'We'll get him, dead or alive', we still have no clue where he's hiding.")

But enough of the complaints. Today was a great day because I got a call back from one of my dream companies, and they're scheduling me for an interview next week. Wish me luck!

Familiarity Breeds Contempt

"It's Texas, a culture that is unfamiliar to Germans." Wuddaya mean? We've seen ALL the John Wayne movies. We know EXACTLY what's what.

Marketing 101

... as relayed by Halley's Comment.
So, are you fantastic in bed? (I'm doing a focus group.)

Gain Up To 40 Pounds

Of muscle, that is. I wouldn't even have looked twice at this unsolicited commercial bulk email, but the sender's last name was the same as mine. What, a new marketing trick? But no, I looked at his website, and his name really is Pete Sisco. No further info on him, but hey, if you want to bulk up, don't let me stop you ... there ya go.

Not In My Name Either

The natives are getting restless ... dissent is growing more and more. The San Jose Metro has a fabulous cover this week (sorry, no link yet ... give me an afternoon, and I'll photograph it, and link to the image), and two articles relating to decreasing support for the government: "Born in the USA", describing California and especially the Silicon Valley as a hotbed of mistrust and discontent, and "Faith No More", listing ten very convincing conspiracy theories about what's really behind Bush's obsession with getting a war on against Bagdad.

And today's San Jose Mercury News looks deeper into counting crowds, after last week's widely differing estimates of the anti-war demonstrations in San Francisco. Was it 40,000 or 250,000 who marched? I'll hold with a fairly conservative 150,000. And in any case, that's a lot of people taking to the street.

In other news ...
Saddam Hussein is taking early retirement
Citing a generous early-retirement package, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has announced that he will return to private life this June. "I spoke with my benefits coordinator," Hussein told reporters and curious U.N. weapons inspectors, "and realized that I was fully vested and could retire at 80 percent of my highest average salary during the last five years of my dictatorship."